You would think that going to a movie theater would be a fairly universal experience: you pay a relatively inflated price to sit in a relatively comfortable seat to watch a movie on the big screen and hope that the other people in the theater aren't too talky and annoying.
I knew to expect some differences here, like intermissions and assigned seating and bringing coffee or beer into the theater in a lovely mug or glass. (The last two, by the way, also happen to be hallmarks of certain overpriced theaters in the U.S. You know who you are.)
But it seems like every time I go see a movie in Nijmegen, I discover some outrageous (if minor) thing that I just didn't see coming.
This time, it was "Kijkwijzer", the Dutch equivalent of Motion Picture Association ratings system in the U.S.
A system after my own heart, it uses a series of cute little black & white icons to point out what you can expect in the movie of your choice.
"AL" stands for something (alles? allemaal?) that means "everyone", and the numbers refer to the ages for which the movie is appropriate.
As someone stuck in the 1970's school of parenting, I find the 6, 9 and 12 distinctions a little overbearing, but I'm generally on board with the part about labels for movies that indicate age appropriateness.
(In reality, I'm stuck in the "Gee, that seems like a great job for someone else to do" school of parenting, but if I were to parent, it would be as a member of the 1970's school. Just look at how well I turned out!)
The rest of the icons, from left to right, stand for violence, sex, scary, drug/alcohol abuse, discrimination, and coarse language.
Violence? Sure, I get that. Sex? I get that, too. What I don't and can't get is the icon showing what it would look like if you sat at the end of a bed with two people having sex on it.
(I'll pause here while you scroll back up, look closely at the icon, and then fall out of your chair.)
Almost every Dutch person I've met seems to have the impression that all Americans are prudes. I usually protest this vigorously, but this icon seriously blows my mind.
If there were an icon depicting sex in the U.S. — and I think it's safe to say that there probably wouldn't be — it would probably take the form of an euphemistic kiss or embrace, like a logo you might see on a box of condoms, not the bottoms of feet of people engaged in the act itself.
The next one on the list is "scary", which I also struggle with a little bit. The cute spider works well enough for, say, Night of the Living Dead, or Poltergeist.
What it doesn't work for is Precious, the movie I went to see. Sorry, Kijkwijzer, but Precious was tragic and complicated and scary in the worst-side-of-humanity sense of scary, not scary in the big-hairy-spider sense of scary.
The next one is drug / alcohol abuse, smartly depicted with a syringe. Nice work, Kijkwijzer. No problems there.
Which brings us to discrimination, with an icon that appears to be a group of white overlords standing in a group, threatening a person of color.
Not to put too fine a point on things, but this? From the people who brought you Black Pete? Seriously?
I am all for pointing out (or kijkwijzing) discrimination in its many nefarious forms. But I can't for the life of me figure out why this is on the list of things to alert viewers about in a movie. Any way you spin it, it just doesn't make sense:
"No, baby, I don't want you to go see that movie with your friends. It has discrimination in it."
"Do you want to go see a romantic comedy tonight?" "Mmmm...no. I'm more in the mood for something that depicts, I don't know, maybe some discrimination?"
"You know, I think it's high time that we took little Maaike to see a movie with some discrimination in it."
"Hey, have you heard about that movie Precious? I'm thinking about taking John on a date to see it." "Oh, you'd better be careful. I've heard that it has discrimination in it."
What puzzles me even more is how Kijkwijzer determines whether or not a movie deserves a discrimination rating. It's hard to describe in just a few words, but Precious is the story of an obese, illiterate, black teenager whose mother beats her and whose father rapes and impregnates her.
So I can understand that it has a violence rating and a coarse language rating, and while I'm not fully on board with the scary spider rating, I can let that one go. (I'm not sure why it didn't also get the sex sticker, since the rape scenes gave a pretty clear picture of what was going on.)
But I've really thought about this a lot, and I can't figure out what exactly about this movie triggered the discrimination rating. My first (admittedly cynical) thought was, is it just because this is the Netherlands and the movie has black people in it?
There are other possibilities, of course: is it because the mother makes disparaging remarks about gays? Is it because the family calls the baby with Down Syndrome (somewhat affectionately) "Mongo?" Is it because of the daily harassment Precious takes for being obese?
But those all seem like very minor side notes to the central struggle with abuse and to a lesser extent, illiteracy.
Sure, it doesn't take a huge leap to realize that there are forms of longstanding, systemic discrimination influencing Precious' world in general and her experiences with the welfare and education systems in particular.
But something tells me that the fine people at Kijkwijzer aren't contemplating the socioeconomic history of inner cities in the United States when they slap that little discrimination sticker on a movie like this.
So I continued to be puzzled by why the discrimination rating exists in the first place, and why this particular movie gets one.
And last but not least, we have coarse language. Not to be confused with a warning for projectile vomiting from men without arms.
